The statements in this section merely provide background information related to the present disclosure and should not be construed as constituting prior art.
In various orthopedic surgical procedures, it is often necessary to secure or stabilize two or more portions of bone or soft tissue relative to one another. This need is often the result of a bone or soft tissue injury, such as an acute fracture of the bone. To ensure that the damaged bone fragments are capable of properly regenerating, it is important that the bone fragments be adequately stabilized during the regeneration process. To adequately stabilize the injured bone fragments and/or soft tissue, a bone distraction frame is typically installed onto the patient.
Once a distraction frame has been installed onto a patient, it is sometimes necessary to further adjust the frame to fine tune the alignment of the damaged bone fragments or soft tissue. This process, which is referred to as “fracture reduction,” is typically performed under the guidance of a C-arm (X-ray) and involves the surgeon manually pulling on the transfixation pin until the bones are aligned in a desired orientation. Once the surgeon is satisfied with this alignment, the clamps of the distraction frame can then be tightened.
While many external fixation devices have proven generally effective for stabilizing bones, these conventional systems are often difficult and time consuming to adjust once assembled, particularly as the surgeon may need to manually loosen and retighten the clamps several times during the fracture reduction process. Not only is the adjustment process time consuming, but the health and safety of the surgeon is also potentially compromised, particularly as the surgeon must expose his hands to the X-ray field during the reduction process. Thus, it would be useful to have an external fixation framing system that is not only easy to assemble, but also provides the surgeon with a greater degree of flexibility in terms of safely adjusting the frame once it has been assembled.
The present application is intended to improve upon and resolve some of these known deficiencies of the art.